Guild Wars 2 – Wait Awhile

Still playing Guild Wars 2. But rapidly approaching the point where it’s more annoying than fun.

Because of all the bugs. I generally will wait a bit after an MMO comes out so that they can iron out the major problems. I’m patient and the launches for these things never go as smoothly as everyone hopes. But I played in the Guild Wars 2 beta. And it was relatively bug free. At the time, I was thinking that it just needed some basic tweaks. So I preordered. And those first few levels were relatively bug free. There were occasional glitches, but I’m a pretty understanding person. I filled out my bug reports and moved on.

But now I realize that the bugs were fairly clean from those early levels because so many people had been exploring them in the beta. Once I passed level 50, things got worse and worse. For one, look at that screenshot. It’s so dark. The actual game isn’t that dark. I have no idea why that is. That’s relatively minor though. And the weird artifact of the guild bank telling me I’m not a member of a guild, despite the fact that I formed the guild is a minor annoyance. For another, I’ve had bugged storyline missions that don’t complete. In fact, I’d say just about every third storyline mission has some bug that requires me to repeat it at least once – if it even works at all. And then there’s the bugged skill challenges in later zones keeping me from completing my 100% of those zones. And then the dungeon bug where people in a party were being placed in different instances of the same dungeon. Or the fact that the event chains in Orr are almost always broken so nothing ever happens. Or not getting credit for completing those event chains. And the massive grouping problems.

Part of those concerns were caused by Arenanet not being prepared for the massive influx of players. They didn’t have enough server capacity when the game started so my friends couldn’t get into the same server I was on. That was eventually fixed. And then the Trading Post was down for the first couple weeks of the game, due to those massive amounts of people. Again, I’m understanding. I think they probably should have had a better idea of the relative popularity of their game before launch and been more prepared, but whatever. These are size issues and have been addressed.

So, if you were interested in playing Guild Wars 2, I’d suggest waiting awhile. Give it three months. Hopefully these issues will get fixed. It’s a good game with a lot of baggage from previous MMOs excised. It’s worth playing. Just not right now.